MY STORY
My story as an artist began when I was 11 years old.
I was in the family kitchen when my mother brought me gouache, brushes, and a small canvas. During the hour and a half I spent painting my first portrait, I felt something activate in my mind. From my body, from my hands, a gesture was articulated to create. A new desire was born that day: to give birth to figures, bodies, and beings made of colors and shapes to draw my humanity, my own humans.
However, it was only at the age of 29 that I produced my first large-scale figurative painting.
In between, I followed an academic training in visual arts, while exploring other art forms such as photography, graphic design and sculpture. Yet deep down I knew that painting would be the primary expression of my art, my artistic destiny. But, curiously, I turned my back on it in favor of a quest for human and cultural adventures far from the Parisian life I had experienced for 13 years.
My first female figure, "the Madonna," was born in the heart of autumn 2014 in Winnipeg, Canada.
Of those four years in North America, only two periods devoted to my art allowed me to develop my painting. It was during these periods that I finally found my own way of painting my canvases. That was it, I was ready to devote myself entirely to my painting!
I took all my artistic work and returned to France to settle on the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle, determined to produce my first collection. This was followed by a long period of solitude, chosen to give birth to the fruit of my research, a series of coherent canvases in keeping with my artistic style.
But, September 12, 2016 was going to radically change my life.
As I dove into a swimming pool, my head hit the bottom so hard that it broke my neck. I couldn't move my limbs. I was totally paralyzed. My body stagnated at the bottom of the pool, unable to return to the surface. In the gravity of the water, I waited for someone to save me, my life hanging by a thread. Two hands, then two more, freed me from the bottom. I was lucky that day to be rescued from the water by my wife and a friend. Everything went very quickly: helicopter, operation, artificial coma, discharge from intensive care two months after the accident, rehabilitation for a year and a half. Verdict: I was an incomplete quadriplegic.
It was now impossible to physically paint like before!
it took me a long time to accept and live this new life with this new body and its new physical capacities. It was now impossible to paint physically as before! It took 5 years, after my release from rehabilitation, to think about and test a new approach to my art, with the help of my wife.
At first, with the help of others, I tried to recreate my painting, but I couldn't control the gesture.
5 years of Research and Development to combine several techniques and regain complete control of my painting.
My creations have thus evolved. Finally, they bring together all the techniques acquired during my years of training and artistic work (graphic design, photography, drawing, painting).
The New Madonna
A hybrid painting is born, while remaining faithful to the soul of my pictorial work: the junction between classical painting and digital assembly.